Ask a casual viewer what speedrunning is about and they'll say speed. Ask a veteran runner and they'll pause, sigh slightly, and start explaining category theory. Because the fastest time in any given game is almost never the most interesting part of the story. The interesting part is the argument that preceded it — the weeks or months of community warfare over which glitches are allowed, which skips are considered "in bounds," and whether a particular movement trick counts as an intended mechanic or a broken exploit that should be banned. Welcome to the most competitive game within the game: the politics of the speedrun ruleset.
What Even Is a Category?
For the uninitiated, speedrun categories are the rulesets that define a valid run. Any% is the most famous — finish the game as fast as possible, by any means necessary. But then comes 100%, which requires completing everything, and from there the taxonomy explodes. Low%, glitchless, no major skips, all bosses, all dungeons, all hearts, all collectibles. Each category is a separate contract between a community and itself, a collectively agreed-upon definition of what "beating the game" actually means.
The thing is, nobody hands these rules down from on high. Speedrunning.com and individual game communities on platforms like SRC maintain leaderboards, but the rules themselves emerge from negotiation. A runner discovers a new skip. The community debates whether it should be allowed in the main category or spun off into its own. Someone gets mad. A poll is held. The poll is disputed. A splinter category is born. Repeat forever.
This process sounds chaotic because it is. But it's also, arguably, the most intellectually rigorous design process happening in gaming right now — and it's being done entirely by volunteers who just want to go fast.
The Glitch vs. Intended Mechanic War
The central conflict in almost every category dispute comes down to one deceptively simple question: did the developers mean for this to happen?
Take a game like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which has one of the most documented and debated speedrun communities in history. The "wrong warp" technique — which allows runners to skip enormous sections of the game by manipulating the game's memory — is allowed in Any% but banned in categories like Glitchless. The community decided, collectively, that wrong warps represent a level of game-breaking that changes the run's identity entirely. So they built a fence around it.
But that fence is never permanent. When a new trick is discovered — say, a precise jump that clips through a wall — the question immediately becomes: is this a glitch, or is this just the physics engine doing what physics engines do? Runners who want the trick in the main category will argue it's an emergent property of intentional game design. Runners who want it banned will call it unintended behavior that trivializes the run. Both sides are usually arguing in good faith. Both sides are also, in a very real sense, arguing about the nature of games themselves.
The Category That Tore a Community Apart
This isn't hypothetical drama. Communities have fractured over exactly this kind of dispute. The Hollow Knight speedrunning community spent significant time debating the legitimacy of certain movement tech that allowed runners to gain velocity in ways that felt inconsistent with the game's intended design. The argument wasn't just about whether the trick was fast — it was about what kind of game Hollow Knight was supposed to be when run competitively. Was it a precise platformer where movement mastery should be the skill expression? Or a routing puzzle where any tool that gets you to the end is fair game?
Similar debates have played out in the Dark Souls community over the "wrong warp" equivalents, in Super Mario Odyssey over cap bounce tech, and in virtually every major game with an active competitive scene. The pattern is consistent: a new discovery forces a community to articulate values it had never needed to make explicit before.
That articulation process is where the real competition lives.
The Fastest Time Is Rarely the Most Interesting Story
Here's the thing that casual speedrun viewers often miss: the world record holder in Any% is not always the most respected runner in a community. Category creators — the people who design the rulesets, who identify which categories are worth competing in, who build the leaderboard infrastructure and write the rules documentation — often carry more cultural weight than whoever currently holds the top time.
Creating a category that the community actually adopts is a creative act. It requires understanding what makes a game fun to run, what skills should be tested, and how to write rules tight enough to prevent abuse but loose enough to allow discovery. A well-designed category will generate competition for years. A poorly designed one dies in a week because nobody wants to run it.
Some of the most celebrated figures in speedrunning history are known not for their times but for their contributions to category theory. They're the legislators of a sport that has no governing body, no commissioner, and no rulebook that anyone was required to sign.
Why This Matters Beyond Speedrunning
There's a broader point here that goes past competitive gaming. The speedrunning community's process of collectively negotiating rules from scratch — in real time, in public, without institutional authority — is a genuinely fascinating model of how player communities self-govern. It's messy, it's occasionally toxic, and it produces outcomes that are sometimes arbitrary. But it also produces outcomes that the community actually owns. Nobody can appeal to a developer to settle a dispute. The runners have to figure it out themselves.
That process surfaces something important about games as a medium: the rules of a game are never fully determined by the people who made it. Players complete the design. They decide what the game is for, what skills it should test, and what counts as winning. Developers write the code, but communities write the meaning.
Speedrunners just do this more explicitly, more publicly, and with considerably more shouting in Discord servers than most players realize.
The Real Race
Next time you watch a speedrun and the commentator mentions a "glitchless" or "no OoB" category, remember that someone — probably a group of passionate, argumentative people who genuinely love the game — spent hours debating whether that category should exist, what its rules should be, and whether the current world record holder actually followed them correctly.
The timer on screen is almost beside the point. The real race was the friends we argued with along the way.
If you've never gone down the rabbit hole of a game's speedrunning wiki or its SRC forum threads, you're missing one of the most entertaining and genuinely thoughtful corners of gaming culture. It's not just about going fast. It's about who gets to decide what fast even means — and that question, it turns out, has no finish line.
